Born in Greenock in 1965 the daughter of painter James Watt RGI (1931 - ), Watt went on to study at the Glasgow School of Art, graduating in the late 1980s as part of a remarkable wave of neo-figurative painters; her peers including Stephen Conroy and Ken Currie.

In 1987 Watt won the National Portrait Gallery's Annual Award, which secured her the representation of some of the country's leading galleries including Marlborough Fine Art in London. In 1997, a decade on, Watt began to introduce her now famous folds of fabric to the backdrops of her portraiture, an angle she continued to cultivate and evolve until she had moved away from the figure altogether.

This has made her earlier figurative output all the more desirable, bei...